University Ruins
When the campus flooded due to the river over-running its banks in 1967, the Campus was destroyed. The birthplace of Lovecraftian Horror, Howard Phillip Lovecraft actually attended the university from 1909 to 1914. A fertile ground for the budding author's macabre imagination, rumors and gossip were written down to become the foundations of some of his epic tales. The Miskatonic University, named after the river it overlooks, never recovered from the flooding, and was forced to close its doors immediately afterward. Still a swamp-land, the once inhabited buildings have been all but overtaken by the wildlife of the river, and the wild-growing bushes and trees that make this area their home. Frogs, fish, cranes, ocelots, bobcats, osprey, seagulls, and a plethora of brassy, fearless pigeons call this bog their home, and there are movements from outside the city to have it marked as a nature preserve, which the Miskatonic Gift Shop would quite like to see go through. Places of Interest 'The Flooded Quad '(Location) Where students once gathered to study, hold events and sit in the sun between classes, it is now a marshy grassland with waist-high reeds and the occasional jutting streetlamp. 'Copley Memorial Bell Tower '(Location) Pealing in the night, the ghostly bell-tower stands at an angle. Part of the southern wall, the wall it leans away from, has sheared away, leaving a gaping black break in the foundation of the tower, with bricks protruding like broken, rotting teeth. The sinking tower is marsh-wet and dangerous, and the only reason it hasn't been knocked down already is because of the astronomical cost of terraforming the land across the quad to reach the belltower, which stands near the center of campus. Run down and in need of very expensive repairs, this historical landmark stands eight stories high. The neo-Gothic stone tower was built in the memory of three sons who perished in the Civil War. The cracked, rusted bells still chime occasionally. 'Dean Halsey Park '(Location) Dean Halsey's left hand still clings to his jacket above the midsection, but his right hand, once uplifted in a cradling posture of scholarly beckoning has been long since lost. A small, overgrown garden adorned with granite benches and pigeons frames the granite-etched statue of long-gone Dean Halsey. Commissioned in 1906 and erected two years later, the grateful citizens of Arkham subscribed to and paid for this statue to honor the beneficent doctor's heroic sacrifice during the typhoid epidemic of 1905. The statue is nine feet high and stands upon a carved Carrara marble pedestal seven feet tall, gazing benignly upon Church Street. Disturbingly, the ground around Halsey's feet is bone-dry, and one of the few places in the ruins that seems to have utterly escaped the water damage of the flooding so many years ago. Questions remain, however, as to what could have taken the Dean's hand, since this central portion of the garden is otherwise almost untouched by decay. 'Locksley Hall '(Location) The austere and monolithic Locksley Hall looms 'larger' than it actually stands. Even now that the grounds have been flooded, and the ground floor remains six inches under water, with paving curled up helplessly in the mud for dangerous stumbling-blocks, the trees and bushes peel away from the building, making its presence seem to loom amongst the willows and ivy. A graceful but heavily decayed red-brick Georgian structure, built in 1779, it's the oldest building on campus. It boasts a 250 seat auditorium, flooded at the bottom to over eight feet of standing, stagnant water. The auditorium rings for a mile around now with the frog-song of thousands of indigenous amphibians, a deafening cacophany in the spring and summer. The Red Door While all the other doors on campus are shades of green or blue, deep under water in the Locksely Hall basement is a door that still stands locked against the dangerous flood tides. This door was metal, once, and now stands a livid, almost bloody red, the rust that has accumulated on its surface picked out in curious patterns like eldritch runes and fingernail scratches. The air in that lower hallway, what little there is, is ripe with packed natural gas, from the broken mains that split during the flooding. With no way out, that stagnant air prevents plant-life from moving in, and makes even the water toxic to all that lives and breathes. 'Miskatonic University Gift Shop' (Location) This hideous neo-classic residence used to be the President's House. It has since been pressed into service as the Miskatonic University Gift Shop, a major tourist location for the city of Kingsmouth. The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft from Miskatonic University Press is particularly popular. The door screams at those who enter, and a big rubber Cthulhu head peers out from above the main register, gaudy in the extreme. The gift shop is a protruding sore thumb of modern banality taking advantage of the truly gothic and terrifying atmosphere of the abandoned campus. Parking is on a frequently repaired sand-based paved lot just outside, and a chain-link fence prevents visitors from wandering onto the marshy grounds. 'The Jeremiah Orne Library '(Location) The gem of the university, this was a repository for over 400,000 carefully chosen books and pamphlets. The three-story Gothic structure was built of native granite in 1878, and although the marble halls are cold and drafty, the library is well lit by tall, arched windows that allow maximum light to penetrate an otherwise dreary structure. The library is open 8am to 9pm, Monday-Friday; 10am to 6pm on Saturday; 1-6pm on Sunday. Bound periodicals and university records are stored in the basement, though the disastrous Miskatonic flood of 1967 destroyed portions of this collection and it remains full of stagnant water. The major book holdings, which were contained on the upper floors of the building, mostly survived. 'The West Dormitary '(Location) Called Hell West because of the noise, commotion, a faulty heating plant, drafty doors and windows, and inadequate plumbing. Freshmen men had to live here, unless living at home in Arkham. Hell West completely collapsed in 1993, the upper floors sagging inward no longer able to support themselves on muddy, marshy ground. Now, the building is visible only as a kind of hillock on the campus, over-grown with thorny weeds and vines, and strewn with dangerous broken glass, jutting metal, and loose, mud-caked rubble. Beneath the ground is a different story. The lower rooms of Hell West are moderately stable, the concrete boiler room particularly, where the chugging boiler now lays silent and hungry like some hellish iron beast in waist-deep water, peeking up from the black murk. 'Dorothy Upman Hall '(Location) Four stories high, this massive brickwork building has not survived well. The roof leaks notoriously, cracked plaster spiderwebs across walls and floors sag. The dormitory was exclusively for female students, and stood half-empty even in its prime. Today, ironically, it is the most held-together building still on campus. While the roof leaks, the plaster sags, and the carpets are mildewed and often soggy, the homeless of Kingsmouth often find that indoors is still better than outdoors in the freezing winter months, and the close proximity of Whitechapel makes for good pan-handling in the inclement weather. Many of the windows have been boarded from the inside, but there are dry rooms even on the ground floor. 'Charles Tyner Science Building' (Location) This building housed the School of Applied Sciences along with advanced experimental labs for physics and chemistry. An auxiliary powerhouse within the building provided the large electrical loads called for by some experiments. Since the flood, the rows and rows of chemicals and instruments have been looted by drug pushers, homeless folk, and vandalizing kids, but there are still locked cabinets and racks that contain the creepy, formaldehyde preserved corpses of fetal pigs, long-dead frogs, skinless snakes, and other, less identifiable horrors. The Science Building has neither sunken nor collapsed, but it has flooded terribly. Knee high through the hallways, the ground flooring has peeled up in unpleasant, slick, sharp-edged curls, and paving beneath has given way in some places into the rooms and flooded hallways below. These deadly holes have swallowed up more than one explorer, and it isn't uncommon for a gutsy teen explorer to stumble upon a bloated, waterlogged corpse of some desperate homeless scavenger, or a fellow gutsy teen whose footing wasn't quite so sure. There are many reasons the city has declared the old campus a danger to be avoided, and fenced it in with high chain link and sturdy steel posts. Category:University Ruins Category:Arkham Category:Locations Category:Southside Category:Claimed territories